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Premodern East Asia and the Power of Character Scripts Wiebke Denecke

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Premodern East Asia and the Power of Character Scripts Wiebke Denecke 15 Worlds Without Translation: Premodern East Asia and the Power of Character Scripts Wiebke Denecke We are used to thinking that translation is indispensable. An English speaker without competence in Latin does not understand Virgil unless he is translated into English. But we forget that this is partly a function of the alphabetic script Latin and English use. Translation has not been a prerequisite for full mutual intelligibility with char- acter scripts that rely heavily on logographic writing, in which each character stands for a word (more precisely a morpheme). As we will see below, into the twentieth century an educated Japanese, for example, could read a Chinese text by pronouncing it in Japanese, without any knowledge of Chinese or any need for translation. All cultures that were arguably independent sites of script invention developed scripts with a strong logographic component: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hiero- glyphs, Chinese characters, and Maya glyphs. Of these primary scripts only Chinese survives today, vigorously, from its already mature form in the thirteenth century bce into our digital age. It is used in the sinophone world, in Japan, and to a limited degree in Korea, and it stands as a thought-provoking exception to the alphabetic scripts that dominate much of today’s world. Some scholars have, justly, downplayed the difference between logographic systems, where the relation between sign and sound is more flexible, and syllabic or alphabetic systems, which are more prescriptive and phonographic (recording sound). I. J. Gelb’s (1963) scheme that assumes a progression from logographic to syllabic to alphabetic writing systems is questionable (Daniels and Bright 1996, 8–10). Even strongly logographic scripts like Chinese have systematic phonographic elements that make A Companion to Translation Studies, First Edition. Edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Worlds Without Translation 205 the pronunciation of many characters predictable (deFrancis 1984). In turn, the spell- ing of alphabet-based languages such as English can be so resistant to historical change that it becomes unrecognizable as a phonographic rendering of contemporary speech, thus acquiring a logographic element. Still, I argue in this essay that we should remain sensitive to fundamental qualitative differences between scripts and pay more atten- tion to their wide-ranging cultural and literary implications. Alphabetic writing has often been considered the ultimate goal in the evolution of writing systems. Against the backdrop of this prejudice, this essay presents some distinctive advantages of Chinese characters and calls for more serious attention to script in translation studies. It explores how the Chinese script has shaped cultural traditions in East Asia, namely China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, all of which adopted it for administrative, religious, and literary uses and adapted it to their own vernaculars in the absence of an indigenous writing system. I focus on early Japan, although the arguments apply with variations to other East Asian cultures and until the twentieth century. We will see how the Chinese script explored dimensions of literary expression closed to alphabetic scripts and how it enabled a multilingual East Asian “world without translation,” unifying various Chinese dialects or languages that were mutually unintelligible in speech, but identical in writing. What is more, cul- tures beyond the Sino-Tibetan language family developed special reading techniques for Chinese texts using vernacular glossing (called kundoku in Japanese) and face-to- face communication through writing (so-called “brush talk”), which made translation unnecessary. These phenomena have so far received scant attention in translation studies, although Judy Wakabayashi has called attention to them. Their study would widen the theoretical scope of the discipline decisively. To strengthen my call for more serious attention to script I will show how early Japanese and Latin literatures – oth- erwise quite comparable in their high regard for their respective mother cultures, China and Greece – launched onto different paths partly owing to the different nature of their scripts. Alphabetic Triumphalism Modern prejudices against the complexity of the Chinese script are so pervasive that scholars have hardly dared to show its advantages. True, European Enlightenment thinkers such as Gottfried Leibniz admired the Chinese script and used it as inspira- tion for their own speculations about the existence of a universal language that could communicate meaning without being couched in any particular language. But since the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese script has come under heavy attack in both East Asia and the West. It is decried as inefficient, unfit for achieving mass literacy, and even obstructive to creative thought (see Hannas 2003). Various alpha- betization movements tried to remove this burden of tradition either by replacing characters with the alphabet, as in Vietnam, or by simplifying the characters, as in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Ironically, prominent Western scholars of East 206 Wiebke Denecke Asian languages have encouraged such prejudices. John DeFrancis is scandalized by the “crippling influence of the characters” and the “incubus of . character scripts” (1989, 266) and claims that the Japanese devised “one of the worst overall systems of writing ever created” (1989, 138). Marshall Unger goes as far as faulting Chinese characters for the sharp drop in book sales and the rise of comic books in postwar Japan, although he fails to account for comparable developments in postindustrial alphabet-based societies (2004, 11). Eric A. Havelock, a classicist who tried to understand the linguistic and cognitive changes that happened in Greece as it moved from the archaic oral world of the Homeric epics to the textual culture of the classical and post-classical age, has argu- ably advanced the most sweeping argument for the superiority of alphabetic lan- guages. He identifies a single cause for the “Greek miracle”: the invention of the alphabet. Making blanket arguments for Western exceptionalism, he asserts that those peoples and cultures who had adopted the Greek invention had set the pace in the development of law, literature, science, and philosophy, culminating in the industrial revolution – had in fact invented “modernism.” Those using other script systems – Arabic, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Japanese – had tagged along, employing the alphabetic script in varying degrees of “modernism” . None of them could be imposed easily upon the genes of small children so successfully as to meld into an automatic reflex at the unconscious level. (Havelock 1987, 1) The fact is that conceptual syntax (which means alphabetic syntax) supports the social structures which sustain Western civilization in its present form. Without it, the lifestyle of modernity could not exist; without it there would be no physical science, no industrial revolution, no scientific medicine replacing the superstitions of the past, and I will add no literature or law as we know them, read them, use them. (Havelock 1986, 147) Havelock loved analogies from modern science, and his argument for the superior- ity of the alphabet relied on a reductive notion of technical efficiency. Perhaps because he is mainly appreciated as a pioneer of orality/literacy studies through his influence on Walter J. Ong, he triggered surprisingly little outrage with his raw alphabetic triumphalism. Havelock’s vision makes so many simplistic assumptions about literacy that it would be equally preposterous to prove him wrong by positing the superiority of any other script. Yet we can make his and other alphabetic fetishists’ claims pro- ductive by asking what kinds of impact the Chinese script has had on East Asian cultural history. The Power of the Chinese Script in East Asia Western translation studies have paid little attention to how script affects translation and impacts broader cultural patterns of whether, why, and how translation occurs. This is partly due to the temporal and geographic disjunction between the develop- Worlds Without Translation 207 ment of the world’s scripts and the history of the field of translation studies. The logographic writing systems of the ancient world are dead and the philologists who study these defunct languages have no stake in translation studies. The Chinese script is of course the exception and certainly not negligible, since it represents more than a fifth of the world’s population. But the dominant languages that drive theorization in translation studies are alphabet-based European vernaculars: the entry on “script” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation devotes more space to Guillaume Apol- linaire’s fanciful Calligrammes than to a serious engagement with non-alphabetic scripts and their implications for translation cultures. Also, certain focal concerns in translation studies – economic and digital globalization and their ethical and technical implications for translation; translation in international affairs, entertainment, science, and technology – are unlikely to intersect with the interests of ancient world philolo- gists. Quite apart from this disjunction between scholars, their concerns, and the scripts they use or research, linguistics – one of the central mother disciplines of translation studies – tends to favor language and speech over
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